Evil and the Problem of Suffering in Nature

In traditional Christian theology, suffering and death are
the result of human sin stemming from the Fall conceived of as
an actual historical event. Though "death" often meant
both biological death and spiritual death, the reality of suffering,
disease, and death in non-human nature was understood as the consequence
of human disobedience to God and the expulsion of humankind from
the idyllic life once theirs in the Garden of Eden.

With the rise of Biblical critical scholarship over the past
two centuries, and along with it the development of modern science,
including geology as well as biology, the historicity of the Fall
has been largely abandoned by wide sections of the Christian tradition.
The Genesis narrative remains crucially important as focusing
our attention on the reality of sin, both the sins of individual
people and of social and political institutions, and on the reality
of the consequences of sin in terms of the destruction we bring
about on humanity and the environment. But as an explanation of
the historical origins of sin, the Fall narrative is of much less
help. How then do we account for the inevitable and universal
fact of human sinfulness?

One approach is to see sinfulness and the capacity to do evil
as something which arose sui generis with the evolution
of humanity as a distortion of those aspects which distinguish
homo sapiens in the context of other early hominids. These
include language, imagination, tool making, and all the other
aspects related to the phenomena of self-consciousness and moral
judgment. Another approach is to embed these aspects of humanity
in a long evolutionary pattern of emerging capacities, and to
talk about at least a prefiguring of them in earlier mammalian
species as well as in other contemporary species, such as dolphins
and chimps. But is it appropriate and even sensible to use terms
like morality and evil outside the context of human behavior?

While the debate continues among sociobiologists, anthropologists,
and so on, some see even physics as having at least a limited
bearing on the subject. Clearly the underlying physical characteristics
of what we call sinful and evil acts involve dissipation, decay,
violence, and so on, and thus entropy. It is then possible to
ask whether the laws of thermodynamics are in some way a precondition
for the possibility of the slow evolution of those capacities
which, at least in humanity, emerge as full-blown sinfulness.
Entropy in particular seems to play an ambiguous, multivalent
role here.

For example, not only are dissipation, decay, and death processes
marked by an increase in entropy. Even the production of order
and complexity, of biological novelty, beauty, "design,"
requires an overall increase in entropy in their underlying physical
systems. So we can formulate the question in this way: if God
created the universe for the evolution of life and of creatures
like us capable of entering into covenant with God, was it necessary
to include the laws of thermodynamics in the process? If Murphy
and Ellis can talk about a "moral universe", must we
also talk about a "thermodynamic universe" in which
sin and consequently redemption are included as well? Or does
sin remain something both entirely unique to humanity and without
any precedent whatsoever, and the pre-human world one of amoral
innocence?